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THROUGH THE GUARDED GATE |
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Description Having never written such a piece, Hall was at a loss where to find a text…but she discovered a poet new to her, an American poet named Margaret Widdemer. Although Widdemer shared one of the earliest Pulitzer Prizes in Poetry with Carl Sandburg in the early twentieth century, she is virtually unknown to today’s readers. Her poems are wonderful, and she has written quite a few that pointedly deal with issues of social justice in her time a hundred years ago…issues that, sadly, are still with us a century later. The five songs that comprise “Through The Guarded Gate” discuss how we turn our eyes away from the exploitation and trafficking of our daughters, how men in power send our sons to war never to return for the sole purpose of acquiring money and power, how the women in the early suffragist movement gave up so much in order that subsequent generations might enjoy political power through the right of women to vote, how the modern woman has decided not to play second fiddle to her lover but is asserting her equality in the realm of the romantic relationship, and finally, a march that demands that women be allowed “through the guarded gate” that men for so long have kept closed to women…the gate through which one reaches positions of power and opportunity, through which one is “allowed” to make a mark on the world. Text |
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Listen |
1 – The Net
2 – A Mother to the War-Makers
3 – The Old Suffragist
4 – The Modern Woman to Her Lover
5 – The Women’s Litany